The subject matter relates to acrylic polymers, and in particular, to acrylic copolymers that include controlled placement of reactive functional groups within the polymer structure. The copolymers are useful in the manufacture of adhesives and elastomers.
(Meth)acrylic (co)polymers have been studied and used industrially for more than 50 years. Due to a wide range of monomers, (meth)acrylic (co)polymers display a significant array of viscoelastic properties that lend themselves well to applications in adhesives and elastomers. When compared to other copolymers that are used for similar purposes as (meth)acrylics, several significant advantages of (meth)acrylics become apparent. For example, relative to natural rubber and styrene block copolymers (meth)acrylic copolymers have superior optical clarity, UV stability, and temperature and oxidative resistance. State of the art (meth)acrylic copolymers meet many performance characteristics by virtue of their high molecular weight and crosslinking reactions. Because of the wide array of copolymerizable monomers, (meth)acrylic polymers have tailorable polarity and the ability to undergo a variety of crosslinking reactions. Typically high performance (meth)acrylic copolymers are processed with large amounts of organic solvents.
Increasingly, there are significant economic and regulatory pressures for producers of solvent acrylic polymers to reduce the use of organic solvents in their processes. In particular, it is common for solvent acrylic polymers in adhesive applications to be coated from solutions averaging only 30-40% polymer. The solvent has to be evaporated and then either collected or incinerated, all of which are energy intensive and costly operations. Additionally, removal of solvent from thick adhesive films may produce defects in the dry adhesive film.
Control of polymer architecture is often the subject of intensive research with the goal of improving performance for ever increasingly challenging applications. Architectures that acrylic polymers are known to possess include block copolymers, telechelic polymers, and random polymers of controlled molecular weight. Even though advances in controlling architecture have occurred with many benefits, each of these particular architectural types has disadvantages. For example, block copolymers have high melt viscosities which require high processing temperatures, making it difficult to control reactivity of functional groups. The production of telechelic polymers often involves multiple steps. Telechelics involve the placement of a reactive functional group exclusively on the end terminus of a polymer and not elsewhere in the polymer backbone. Functional groups placed at the end termini of polymers serve solely to increase the linear molecular weight in a manner in which free polymer chain ends are eliminated. As a result, telechelic polymers can yield high strength materials but do not provide the viscoelastic properties critical to adhesives and some elastomer applications. Random polymers of controlled molecular weight require high amounts of crosslinking to attain network formation.
In the past 15-20 years a variety of controlled radical polymerization techniques have been developed to afford good architectural control of (meth)acrylic monomers. These techniques typically are tolerant to a wide variety of monomers and functional groups as opposed to previous techniques like anionic or group transfer polymerization. A substantial amount of fundamental research has been performed to understand these types of polymerization and a thorough review has been edited by Matyjewski. Reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization is one such technique that has been shown to work exceedingly well with a wide variety of (meth)acrylic monomers yielding excellent control of molecular weight and polydispersity. The RAFT mechanism for controlled polymerization is well understood and reported extensively. While some examples of controlled architecture acrylic PSAs have been reported, very little work has been done to explore the influence of reactive functional group placement.